Magic for Beginners: Stories (15 page)

Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is
Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in
North Carolina. Guys kept asking Soap when they were going to see
his sister on TV.

Soap’s mom owned a boutique right on Manhattan Beach. It was
called Float. Becka and Soap called it Wash Your Mouth. The
boutique sold soaps and shampoos, nothing else. The soaps and
shampoos were supposed to smell like food. What the soaps really
smelled like were those candles that were supposed to smell like
food, but which smelled instead like those air fresheners which
hang from the rearview mirrors in taxis or stolen cars. Like
looking behind you smells like strawberries. Like making a clean
getaway smells the same as the room freshener Soap and Becka used
to spray when they’d been smoking their mother’s pot, before she
got home.

Once when they were in high school, Soap and Becka had bought a
urinal cake. It smelled like peppermint. They’d taken the urinal
cake out of its packaging and put it in a fancy box with some
tissue paper and a ribbon. Soap had wrapped it up and given it to
their mother for Mother’s Day. Told her it was a pumice soap for
exfoliating feet. Soap liked soap that smelled like soap. His mom
was always sending care packages of soaps that smelled like olive
oil and neroli and peppermint and brown sugar and cucumber and
martinis and toasted marshmallow.

You weren’t supposed to have bars of soap in prison. If you put
a bar of soap in a sock, you could hit somebody over the head with
it. You could clobber somebody. But Becka made an arrangement with
the guards in the visiting room, and the guards in the visiting
room made an arrangement with the guards in charge of the mailroom.
Soap gave out his mother’s soaps to everyone in prison. Whoever
wanted them. It turned out everyone wanted soap that smelled like
food: social workers and prison guards and drug dealers and
murderers and even people who hadn’t been able to afford good
lawyers. No wonder his mom’s boutique did so well.

While Soap was in prison, Becka kept Soap’s painting for him.
Sometimes he asked and she brought it with her when she came to
visit. He made her promise not to give it to their mother, not to
pawn it for rent money, to keep it under her bed where it would be
safe as long as her roommate’s cat didn’t sneak in. Becka promised
that if there were a fire or an earthquake, she’d rescue the
painting first. Even before she rescued her roommate or her
roommate’s cat.

Carly takes Will into a bedroom. There’s a big painting of a
flower garden, and under the painting is a king-sized bed with
dresses lying all over it. There are dresses on the floor. “Go
ahead and call your dad,” Carly says. “I’ll come back in a while
with some more beer. You want another beer?”

“Why not?” Will says. He waits until she leaves the room and
then he calls his dad. When his dad picks up the phone, he says,
“Hey, Dad, how’s it going?”

“Junior!” his dad says. “How’s it going?”

“Did I wake you up? What time is it there?” Junior says.

“Doesn’t matter,” his dad says. “I was working on a jigsaw
puzzle. No picture on the box. I think it’s lemurs. Or maybe
binturongs.”

“Not much,” Junior says. “Staying out of trouble.”

“Super,” his dad says. “That’s super.”

“I was thinking about that thing we talked about. About how I
could come visit you sometime?” Junior says.

“Sure,” his dad says. His dad is always enthusiastic about
Junior’s ideas. “Hey, that would be great. Get out of that fucking
country while you still can. Come visit your old dad. We could do
father-son stuff. Go bungee jumping.”

The girl in the plastic flower dress marches into the bedroom.
She takes the dress off and drops it on the bed. She goes into the
closet and comes out again holding a dress made out of black and
purple feathers. It looks like something a dancer in Las Vegas
might wear when she got off work.

“Some girl just came in and took off all her clothes,” Junior
says to his dad.

“Well you give her my best,” his dad says, and hangs up.

“My dad says hello,” Junior says to the naked girl. Then he
says, “My dad and I have a question for you. Do you ever worry
about zombies? Do you have a zombie contingency plan?”

The girl just smiles like she thinks that’s a good question. She
puts the new dress on. She walks out. Will calls his sister, but
Becka isn’t answering her cell phone. So Will picks up all the
dresses and goes into the closet. He hangs them up. People clean up
after themselves. Zombies don’t.

In Will’s opinion, zombies are attracted to suburbs the way that
tornadoes are attracted to trailer parks. Maybe it’s all the
windows. Maybe houses in suburbs have too many windows and that’s
what drives zombies nuts.

If the zombies showed up tonight, Will would barricade the
bedroom door with the heavy oak dresser. Will will let the naked
girl come in first. Carly too. The three of them will make a rope
by tying all those dresses together and escape through the window.
Maybe they could make wings out of that feather dress and fly away.
Will could be the Bird Man of Suburbitraz.

Will looks under the bed, just to make sure there are no zombies
or suitcases or that drunk guy from downstairs under there.

There’s a little black kid in Superman pajamas curled up asleep
under the bed.

When Becka was a kid, she kept a suitcase under the bed. The
suitcase was full of things that were to be rescued in case of an
earthquake or a fire or murderers. The suitcase’s secondary
function was using up some of the dangerous, dark space under the
bed which might otherwise have been inhabited by monsters or dead
people. Here be suitcases. In the suitcase, Becka kept a candle
shaped like a dragon, which she’d bought at the mall with some
birthday money and then couldn’t bear to use as a candle; a little
ceramic dog; some favorite stuffed animals; their mother’s charm
bracelet; a photo album;
Black Beauty
and a whole lot of
other horse books. Every once in a while Becka and her little
brother would drag the suitcase back out from under the bed and
sort through it. Becka would take things out and put other things
in. Her little brother always felt happy and safe when he helped
Becka do this. When things got bad, you would rescue what you
could.

Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you
can’t worry about art. Art is for people who aren’t worried about
zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that
Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists,
killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers,
sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant squids, rabid foxes, strange
dogs, news anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists,
psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins,
the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers,
redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature
books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers,
swimmming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry
girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant
lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry
monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things
under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performance artists,
mummies, spontaneous combustion. Soap has been afraid of all of
these things at one time or another. Ever since he went to prison,
he’s realized that he doesn’t have to be afraid. All he has to do
is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It’s just like the Boy Scouts,
except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for
everything that the Boy Scouts didn’t prepare you for, which is
pretty much everything.

Soap is a waste of time too. What good is soap in a zombie
situation? Soap sometimes imagines himself trapped in his mother’s
soap boutique. Zombies are coming out of the surf, dripping wet,
hellishly hungry, always so fucking slow, shuffling hopelessly up
through the sand of Manhattan Beach. Soap has barricaded himself in
Float with his mother and some blond Japanese tourists with
surfboards. “Do something, sweetheart!” his mother implores. So
Sweetheart throws water all over the floor. There’s the surfboards,
a baseball bat under the counter, some rolls of quarters, and a
swordfish mounted up on the wall, but Sweetheart decides the cash
register is best for bashing. He tells the Japanese tourists to get
down on their hands and knees and rub soap all over the floor. When
the zombies finally find a way into Float, his mother and the
tourists can hide behind the counter. The zombies will slip all
over the floor and Sweetheart will bash them in the head with the
cash register. It will be just like a Busby Berkeley zombie
musical.

“What’s going on?” Carly says. “How’s your father doing?”

“He’s fine,” Will says. “Except for the open-heart surgery
thing. Except for that, he’s good. I was just looking under the
bed. There’s a little kid under there.”

“Oh,” Carly says. “Him. That’s the little brother. Of my friend.
Le bro de mon ami.
I’m taking care of him. He likes to
sleep under the bed.”

“What’s his name?” Will says.

“Leo,” Carly says. She hands Will a beer and sits down on the
bed beside him. “So tell me about this prison thing. What did you
do? Should I be afraid of you?”

“Probably not,” Will says. “It doesn’t do much good to be afraid
of things.”

“So tell me what you did,” Carly says. She burps so loud that
Will is amazed that the kid under the bed doesn’t wake up. Leo.

“This is a great party,” Will says. “Thanks for hanging out with
me.”

“Somebody just puked out of a window in the living room. Someone
else almost threw up in the swimming pool, but I got them out in
time. If someone throws up on the piano, I’m in big trouble. You
can’t get puke out from between piano keys.”

Will thinks Carly says this like she knows what she’s talking
about. There are girls who have had years of piano lessons, and
then there are girls who have taken piano lessons who also know how
to throw a party and how to clean throw-up out of a piano. There’s
something sexy about a girl who knows how to play the piano, and
keys that stick for no apparent reason. Will doesn’t have any
zombie contingency plans that involve pianos, and it makes him
sick. How could he have forgotten pianos?

“I’ll help you clean up,” Will says. “If you want.”

“You don’t have to try so hard, you know,” Carly says. She
stares right at him, like there’s a spider on his face or an
interesting tattoo, some word spelled upside down in a foreign
language that she wants to understand. Will doesn’t have any
tattoos. As far as he’s concerned, tattoos are like art, only
worse.

Will stares right back. He says, “When I was at this party
outside Kansas City, I heard this story about a kid who threw a lot
of parties while his parents were on vacation. Right before they
got home, he realized how fucked up the house was, and so he burned
it down.” This story always makes Will laugh. What a dumb kid.

“You want to help me burn down my friend’s house?” Carly says.
She smiles, like, what a good joke. What a nice guy he is. “What
time is it? Two? If it’s two in the morning, then you have to tell
me why you went to prison. It’s like a rule. We’ve known each other
for at least an hour, and it’s late at night and I still don’t know
why you were in prison, even though I can tell you want to tell me
or otherwise you wouldn’t have told me you were in prison in the
first place. Was what you did that bad?”

“No,” Will says. “It was just really stupid.”

“Stupid is good,” Carly says. “Come on. Pretty please.”

She pulls back the cover on the bed and crawls under it, pulls
the sheets up to her chin. Good night, Carly. Good night, Carly’s
gorgeous tits.

It was so small and it was so far away, even when you looked at
it up close. Soap said it was trees. A wood. Mike said it was a
painting of an iceberg.

When Soap thinks about the zombies, he thinks about how there’s
nowhere you can go that the zombies won’t find you. Even the fairy
tales that Becka used to read to him. Ali Baba and the Forty
Zombies. Open Zombie. Snow White and the Seven Tiny Zombies.

Any place Will thinks of, the zombies will eventually get there
too. He pictures all of these places as paintings in a gallery,
because as long as a place is just a painting, it’s a safe place.
Landscapes with frames around them, to keep the landscapes from
leaking out. To keep the zombies from getting in. A ski resort in
summer, all those lonely gondolas. An oil rig on a sea at night.
The Museum of Natural History. The Playboy mansion. The Eiffel
Tower. The Matterhorn. David Letterman’s house. Buckingham Palace.
A bowling alley. A Laundromat. He puts himself in the painting of
the flower garden that’s hanging above the bed where he and Carly
are sitting, and it’s sunny and warm and safe and beautiful. But
once he puts himself into the painting, the zombies show up just
like they always do. The space station. New Zealand. He bets his
dad thinks he’s safe from zombies in New Zealand, because it’s an
island. His dad is an idiot.

People paint trees all the time. All kinds of trees. Art is
supposed to be about things like trees. Or icebergs, although there
are more paintings of trees than there are paintings of icebergs,
so Mike doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“I wasn’t in prison for very long,” Soap says. “What Mike and I
did wasn’t really that bad. We didn’t hurt anybody.”

“You don’t look like a bad guy,” Carly says. And when Soap looks
at Carly, she looks like a nice kid. A nice girl with nice tits.
But Soap knows you can’t tell by looking.